Chapter 11

11

It took a long time for all the sounds to stop. Sprawled, heart thundering, still clutching Riley's arm like a vice although it was too dark to see him, Dale put a hand down and some part of him registered that they were lying in several inches of water. The surface beneath the water was ice cold.

There was a moment of long, horrible silence.

Then Riley pushed himself upright and Dale heard him clear his throat and spit. Vigorously. His voice was husky but quite conversational.

"Ok. What the fuck was that?"

It was so normal a tone that Dale snorted involuntarily; a very inappropriate laugh that came from a muddle of terror and relief, and which removed the inhaled mud from his nose and throat.

"I think that was a landslide. Be careful." he added hastily, grabbing Riley as he felt Riley start to crawl towards it. "That lot will be monumentally unstable."

"We monumentally need to get out of here." Riley pointed out, but he crawled with more caution.

Dale followed him. The earth and mud began a few feet from where they had been lying, but a few feet beyond that they began to feel rock, and there was no chink of light, suggesting that more than just a few feet of dirt was covering the entrance of the cave. Dale knelt up and dug in his pocket, hoping against hope that the fall hadn't smashed it, and hauled out his stable pocket knife. They all carried one, like they all habitually carried wire cutters, water and a rifle on their saddles, and Dale, who liked to know exactly what he was using, knew all the multiple functions on it, including the tiny torchlight. A moment later a very thin beam of light wavered towards the heap of rocks and dirt, and Riley came out with a shocked oath that would have got his mouth washed out at home. There was no chink of light for a good reason. The mouth of the cave was completely obscured, and it was packed tight. Rocks and earth and mulch were crammed together in an ominous bulge, and watery mud was running around the edges of it, deepening the puddles they stood in.

"Does your torch light work?" Dale demanded.

Riley didn't respond beside him, staring at the bulge.

"We've got to get out of here – Dale, we've got to shift this-"

Dale caught his arm swiftly before he could touch it.

"Don't touch it. It'll collapse and we'll be buried, look how it's packed. There's tons resting on top of that."

He could feel Riley's tension through his hand, but Riley stood still and Dale found himself thinking, incongruously, of the men and women in suits he had worked with over the years in their semi virtual world of computers and air conditioning and elevators. Strong leaders in board rooms, they would have been hysterical with terror here. But Riley and the others were men of practical skills, slow to worry, given to problem solving and accustomed to the hard realities of the land and the elements. Riley was stiff, but he wasn't panicking.

Feeling an ice cold calm steal over him – and recognising it, the simple putting aside of all emotion and anything but cool thought- Dale turned to survey the construction they were in, playing his torch over the walls. His immediate concern was how much air they had, but there were ways of using air more slowly, and if necessary he would teach them to Riley. Everything he had ever read, seen or heard was filtering itself quietly in his brain, organising itself into categories of potentially useful information; he was aware of going into what he thought of as high gear, where high concentration came easily, where everything seemed crisper and in sharp focus.

Aden, you probably ought to be flapping. Not finding this interesting.

"The horses will head home." Riley said beside him. "They'll raise the alarm and Flynn knows the route we take with the colts."

And it would take time for Flynn to follow it, to find the bank collapsed – the landslide had affected a vast amount of this section of woodland – and then to gather the men and the heavy equipment to dig it…. It was a rescue mission of days rather than hours.

Dale took a few steps further back into the cave and wiped muddy water off his face. T shirts and jeans were not ideal wear for this situation. It was freezing down here, and they were both wet through. Hypothermia would kill them if dehydration or a further landslide didn't. The thin light of the torch beam picked out another curve of rock and shone on the water pooled on the floor. Man made. The walls were curved, the floor was flat. And it extended back, and back, as far as the torch beam would stretch. Not a cave or a drain, but a tunnel. On David's map the entrance had been south west of the town…

"This is the western mine entrance that we thought was in the woods." he said aloud to Riley. "There must have been landslides here before that covered it."

"This is the mine?" Despite their situation, Riley's voice abruptly gained vitality, and despite the coolness in his head, Dale felt a deep rush of affection. Corporate project teams would have fought over Riley with his unquenchable spirit.

"I think this is the western arm of the main tunnel. It means we've got plenty of air, but our best chance right now is to start walking and to find another exit out of here."

"We can't go wandering off," Riley protested, looking back towards the bulge of rock and earth blocking the tunnel mouth. "This is where they'll look, where the landslide is. It's not exactly safe or sane to move - "

"Ri," Dale said gently. "The whole bank came down. This entrance is covered and probably not even visible from the surface, no one knows it's here. The whole landscape will be changed, it's a big area and it's unstable, it's going to take machinery and professional rescue teams and a lot of time to dig through it all. And realistically they're going to be looking for bodies. No one would survive being buried under that landslide, they can't know we found shelter. If we just sit here, it could be days before anyone finds us."

And I don't give much for our chances by the time they do.

From the look Riley gave him, he picked up on at least some of what Dale didn't say aloud. His voice wavered when he spoke, but he held on to it.

"You worked out the odds?"

Dale forcibly stopped himself from quoting several probabilities he had already calculated.

"Yes. Want to check the figures?"

"No."  Riley tried to smile but it came out more as a grimace.  "Ok. On the up side, I guess we finally have a valid excuse to walk around the mine."

He pulled his knife from his pocket, pulled up the little torch attachment and tried it. Dale put a hand on his arm. It was only then he realised that Riley wasn't only shivering, he was shaking all over.

"We need to save the torches as much as possible," Dale told him, not commenting on the shaking, but squeezing his arm. "We don't know how much battery we've got."

Riley turned his torch off, and Dale shone his thin light beam down the tunnel ahead of them. It was tall enough for a man to stand in, and wide enough to stand with fingers brushing either side. It had been well cleared, and wooden rails were visible in the rock floor, set close together.

"Truck rails." Dale said aloud. " Under all that mulch out there is probably a lot of rock spoil, carted out and dumped. No wonder it's so affected by landslide."

"So we follow the yellow brick road," Riley said acerbically.

Using the thin beam of the torch as a guide Dale put a hand up to the wall, and Riley quickly stopped him.

"No. Remember what Tom said? I've done enough climbing with Jake to know why, and he's right. The walls won't be any safer than the earth fall. We need to touch as little as possible, and not make noise. This has all been rotting down here for years, and Flynn's right. It's lethal."

And it had rotted in its careful balance. A disturbance could bring it crashing down on them. Dale put his free hand down by his side, well away from the wall, and gave the torch to Riley, keeping his voice very soft.

"You've got more experience here than me. You lead. We need to move as fast as we can."

They didn't know how long the torches would last, and moving around this place without light would be suicidal. Riley stepped ahead of him, pausing to look at the ground and the rails and to nudge gently with the toe of the reinforced riding boots they all wore – resistant to being stepped on by horses, and apparently also to derelict mines.

They walked fast, and the tunnel was straight. The rails continued all the way, and while at times the torch beam picked out arches on either side of them in the wall, Dale shook his head when Riley paused beside them.

"Worth trying any of these passages?"

"This is the main access tunnel. Those will be scopes – the dug out chambers the coal came from, and sumps for drainage and so on. This is the walkway. As far as I can tell we're heading north east, nearer to the town."

"They came out some distance to dig." Riley muttered back. "Imagine pushing carts full of spoil up and down here? I hope the poor bastards had better light than we've got."

There were plenty of other dangers down here besides the dark, and Dale kept his mouth shut on them. Fire damp: the methane gas that ignited at the slightest spark. Cold damp, equally suffocating, and mostly carbon dioxide that hung in the darkness as a silent killer. Old explosives, rotted and damp and unstable. They climbed over several rotted carts, rusted and broken on the tracks, and the splintered remains of boxes that had swollen with damp and burst decades before, spilling the remains of candles and the occasional forgotten tool on the ground. Their boots scraped on the rock and on the rails, and the thin torch beam wavered, barely lighting more than a foot or two ahead in the narrow tunnel.  

           
It was the close silence that was most terrifying.

They paused beside a flooded area through one of the side archways that looked like a forgotten cave, and Riley shone the torch beam down on it. The water was blue and still and deceptively peaceful.

"A sump." Dale said softly. "Drainage."

"Should a drain be that flooded?" Riley said just as softly. "There's a hell of a lot of water about down here."

And in these narrow, hidden spaces, drowning was a very real danger.

"At some point the mine will run right under the river bed." Dale looked up the tunnel, trying to calculate distance. It was nearly impossible, their pace was so affected by the stumbling blocks of the rails and by barely seeing in front of them, not to mention by panic that made it seem as though they'd been down here for hours. Looking at his watch, the landslide had been barely half an hour ago.

They kept moving. Rebuking himself for not having thought of it earlier, Dale compared their pace and number of steps with his watch, and calculated that they were moving at perhaps two thirds of a normal walking pace, at a rate of approximately sixty five to seventy steps per minute, which meant allowing for stops and compared to the current time, they had covered a distance of approximately 1760 feet. It was a rough hypothesis but it made him feel better.

"The tunnel splits here." Riley said ahead of him. He raised his torch, and Dale looked with him at the kind of rounded out chamber where two archways of equal size led off in two different directions. The chamber had been well hollowed out, it was higher and larger than the tunnels, and the floor was dry. Riley sat down, warily keeping away from the walls. This had clearly been used for storage and for rest in the mine's past: several remains of candles and a broken lantern lay on the floor amongst broken boxes. Riley cautiously stirred the remains with light fingers, and Dale turned on his torch, crouching to scratch a rapid outline of David and Gam Saan's map from memory in the dust at his feet with a fingernail. It did indeed show the western tunnel, and now it was clear what the tunnel was on the map, it was apparent that this was one of the two main veins of the coal mine.

"This is part a drift mine, and part a shaft mine." he said aloud to Riley. "I don't know how deep the shaft was sunk, but that tunnel there, the one running south east, leads to the shaft. That will break surface somewhere – probably near the town."

"I hear a but." Riley turned over another box.

"But." Dale looked at his scratched map, assessing their position. "For all we know the shaft was sealed, with anything up to and including concrete, and that's if hasn't collapsed. If it is still standing, it'll be a vertical climb of we don't know how many feet, on rotten ladders."

"Not an option." Riley brushed box off his hands. "We're going to need to head towards the gold mine, aren't we?"

"Those are likely to be the most intact tunnels." Dale said slowly. "Although we may find air shafts or spoil shafts that break surface on the way. The north east tunnel heads back into town."

"And under the river." Riley got up, brushing the rest of the box off his legs and his now very muddy jeans. "Which is where the worst of the collapses will be."

"Yes."

It wasn't tempting. This place was quiet and claustrophobic and there was no knowing what lay in the dark in any direction.

"Well we can come back and try the shaft if we don't find anything better." Riley said with a cheerfulness that didn't quite hide the effort behind it. He leaned on Dale's shoulder to look with him at the map. "Where do you think we are?"

"Here." Dale pointed. "The junction. From here there's probably several levels. We're going to need to watch the floors and where we're going. Need to keep following the tracks and not get distracted away into the stopes."

"Follow the tracks." Riley shone his torch through the door of the north eastern tunnel and stepped through it. "That I can do. Hang on a minute."

Dale watched him pick up a rock and scratch a rough cross on the wall near the entrance they had chosen.

"Might help us if we come back this way." he said lightly to Dale. "Or help the others if they do have to follow us in here."

They walked another few minutes before Riley stopped and shone his torch in several directions on the ground.  

"The tracks have disappeared."

Damn. Dale stood still, dredging up everything he knew about mines. False floors was at the top of his mind. If they were in a stope, a dug out cavern, there was no knowing how big was the space around them. It could easily be several hundred feet deep. The miners would have build wooden galleries to replace the tunnelled out rock, to give them something to stand on while they worked, and those false floors were hard to tell from rock floors, being covered in the same dirt and grit. However, unlike the rock, timber floors were very likely to be rotten and inclined to collapse when stood on. He took the torch from Riley and shone it slowly over the floor, listening. There was an audible, soft drip, drip, drip, of water falling long distances, very slowly.

"I think this is a stope." He said very quietly to Riley. "The floor's probably wooden and it's probably unstable. What would you do?"

Riley took a moment to think about it, and Dale saw him gently tap the ground with his boot.

"Test the ground before putting weight down. Stay near the walls; water logging will affect the middle rather than the edges. And go one at a time, spreading the weight. I'll go first, try and step where I do."

He moved slowly and Dale saw him check each step, and within a few feet Riley called back to him.

"You're right. It's wooden. It's shattered right through here, and there's a drop underneath. Keep to your right."

Dale followed him with great care, placing his weight at the edge of the apparently solid path, and a moment later saw what Riley had seen – the fractured edges of rotting wood and a black hole that took up half the path.

"We're coming back into tunnel here," Riley said ahead of him. "And steps. Do we go up?"

Dale covered the last few careful feet over the wooden floor onto the hard, safe rock of the tunnel and went to stand beside him, looking at the roughly hewn stairs. The instinct was strong to go up, but Dale hesitated, thinking again of the map and of the town in relation to where they stood now. The steps led south east, and a smaller tunnel entrance on their left led north, 

"No. I think that leads to more galleries off the shaft tunnel. We need to keep moving north east to find the old part of the mine. This tunnel."

"It looks like it goes deeper." Riley said dubiously. Dale looked past him at the narrow and the increasingly damp walls.

"I think we're getting close to the river. Which means we're going in the right direction."

Riley paused to scratch another cross beside the tunnel, hesitating in the mouth of it for a moment before he raised the torch beam and led the way inside.

There was a point at which you got too cold to notice any more. For a long time it had been painful, but now even the shivering was starting to ease and Dale was long past being aware of it when Riley's torch finally flickered and died. Dale heard him swear and then the fumble while he dug for the other knife and activated its little torch beam.

"Got it. We can't be far from the town now? We've been walking forever."

The tunnel was gradually widening. They saw the rock fall in front of them a few minutes later, a large section of roof and wall that had collapsed, leaving only a small gap visible high up. Riley tested the pile of rubble cautiously, then put the torch in his mouth and climbed. Left in the dark, Dale stood and watched him, trying not to anticipate the sudden thunder of falling rock. Then a torch beam shone through the gap and Riley's voice said softly,

"It's clear, you can climb through."

Dale followed him, scraping cold and numbed hands and knees on the rock as he slid himself through the gap, disturbing the ground as little as possible. The narrow crawl space went on for some way before the tunnel cleared again and he lowered himself down and found Riley, standing upright but a little ducked as they were standing on lower heaps of fallen rubble. They didn't risk speaking. Moving quickly and touching nothing, Riley led the way on.  It was a long time before the rubble petered out completely, leaving clear rock floor behind, and abruptly they reached another hollowed out chamber with steps upward to the east, and another tunnel leading sharply north.

Riley dropped on the floor this time with the speed of weariness and of someone who has been concentrating hard for a long time. Jake had obviously taught him well; Dale had been learning at speed from Riley about how to test weight and move safely in this environment, and it bore little relation to the very few couple of experiences of rock climbing he had at school on outward bound trips.

He crouched, again scratching out the map from memory in front of him. They were in a more complicated part now, where several lines crossed, which to Dale suggested there were several levels here, above and below. It was difficult to be sure which one they were in.

"We may have to try several routes from here," he told Riley, who grunted.

"Yeah. Hadn't we better turn the torch off if we're resting?"

He snapped the torch beam out without waiting for an answer, and they were left in total darkness. Cold, damp smelling, with stale air that had been circulating through these tunnels for decades. A moment later, Dale heard a harsh, ugly retching sound and knew why Riley had turned out the light. There was nothing he could do except wait for the sounds to finish, tasting on bile himself in compassion.  

"Are you ok?" he said softly when the retching finally stopped. The chamber smelled of vomit now as well as damp, and Riley sounded breathless and strained.

"Yeah."

He said nothing else for a moment, then in a still rougher voice said quietly,

"I hate this. I really hate this."  

"We need to keep moving." Dale said softly. Riley muttered, but didn't turn the torch back on.

"I don't fancy having to go back across that false floor again if we've got it wrong."

If the torch ran out, they couldn't do it. It was that simple.

"We'll find a way out of this section," Dale told him quietly, "There will be several. This is a finite space and there are finite routes, it's just a matter of staying calm and being systematic."

He heard a snort from Riley that was distinctly suspicious, and then a still more suspicious swallow and sniff. "Keep saying that. Which way are we trying first?"

"Up the steps. I think that rock fall we passed was the section under the river."

"Won't that mean we're near the collapsed tunnels?" Riley asked uneasily.

"Yes." And on the map, Dale had a fair idea of which those were. "They'll be the lower lying galleries – the ones that way that would come up in the yard at the main mine entrance in the town, the one we looked at. The steps I think will go up towards the older parts of the mine."

"The gold mine." Riley didn't move for a minute, then abruptly pulled out the torch and lit it, and got up, offering a hand to pull Dale to his feet. "Then let's get going."

The steps wound upwards for some way. The tunnel was narrower here, there were no tracks in the floor, and before long Dale brushed a finger very lightly over the wall where it shone.

"It's dry. The waterlogging's stopped."

"Thank God, that's a bit safer." Riley shone the torch back towards the glitter in the wall. "What's that?"

"Quartz."

They walked in silence for a moment, then Dale heard Riley sing softly,

"Quartzite with a serpentine vein that marks the greatest yield,"

He broke off and Dale heard his snort. "We probably ought to be singing the Mary Ellen Carter if we're going to sing Stan Rogers down here."

"Who's Mary Ellen Carter?" Dale trailed him on, following the thin torch beam.

"It's one of his songs, about a ship salvage." Riley ducked under an oddly shaped and low hanging rock that sparkled and glittered with quartz crystals. "It's heavy on the encouragement for surviving difficult situations, which sounds good to me right now."

"And how does that go?"

"Rise again, Rise again," Riley began and stopped. "Yeah. Great sentiment, just probably a bad idea singing down here."

They rounded a corner and the torch beam picked out something bright, like blood spilled on the wall and floor. Riley paused, then whistled softly.

"What's that? Ionised something?"

"Franklinite." Dale said, looking with him. "Zinc iron oxide."

"It's beautiful."

Riley moved on past it and the red faded away into the darkness, then Dale heard Riley yelp and saw him rear back against the wall and shine his torch on the floor.

"Something touched me!"

"A draft?" Dale suggested, looking with him. There was nothing to see. Just rock and dust, a dry floor, but the torch beam lit only a few feet; they were surrounded by pools of darkness.

"If that's a rat," Riley said very grimly, "I am going to go nuts."

"It's not likely to be a rat unless we're very close to the surface." Dale told him. "Keep walking."

It took Riley several deep breaths before he was able to move. They were some way further on when Dale suddenly stopped, looking back the way they had come. It was impossible to see in the darkness; the torch beam barely picked out inches of the ground ahead.

"……Ri? Did that quartzite rock look like a pot hook to you? Hanging from the roof?"

Riley looked at him sharply. "Pot hook; red….?"

"Ginver hole." Dale said, picking up on the list. "That fits the directions."

"But we thought Gam Saan must have seen the miners hit quartzite in the coal section of the mine?" Riley said, thinking about it. "We've come right past the coal sections, haven't we?"  

"We don't know." Dale tapped his shoulder, urging him forward again. "Maybe there were coal tunnels under here, or maybe we guessed wrong and Gam Saan wasn't interested in the coal sections at all. We don't know."

"What do you think about that as a candidate for Ginver's hole?" Riley asked, shining the torch on something ahead of them.

The tunnel opened up into a large, hollowed out chamber, and it was flooded. A sump was visible under the water, set in the centre of the sharply sloping floor. Easily three or four times the size of any other sump they had seen down here, it had obviously been an attempt to prevent flooding, and it had equally obviously failed. The water shone green and blue under the torchlight, deceptively peaceful and beautiful, creating a large pool that completely blocked their path.

"In bad weather these tunnels would flood completely." Dale said, surveying it. "It's high summer now but with just one night of rain last night, look at it."

He took the torch from Riley and shone it up at the walls. They were dry – it had been some weeks since any rain, never mind sustained rain, but high up on the walls he could see the water marks.

"They do flood. Look how high? In winter I bet these tunnels are completely impassable."

"What do we do?" Riley said subduedly. "I don't fancy going near the collapsed tunnels at the front, but we can't wade across this – God knows how deep it is."

"Swim it." Dale said simply. "Give me the torch?"

"You can't get into that!" Riley protested.

Well it was in their way and levitation was out of the question.

Dale took the torch from him, not answering. The water was icy, and shone with queer ripples and flickers as he waded slowly down into it. Keeping the torch in his mouth, he stretched out and it was perhaps eight or ten slow strokes across the pool, before he found hard rock and a bank under his feet and it was possible to scramble up onto dry rock path once more.

"It's fine." he said to Riley, sitting down and shining the torch across the water for him. "Just cold. Take it slowly."

Riley swore as he ducked into the icy water, and Dale moved back as he reached the bank, crawling up it.

"I thought Tom said water in mines was too foul to swim in or see through?"

"I think we're well above the coal line here." Dale handed the torch back. "Keep moving?"

"Pot hook, red, ginver hole, suzu." Riley muttered, squelching in his soaked boots. They were both so cold now that feeling their feet or fingers was becoming an issue. Riley pushed wet hair out of his face and tugged disgustedly at his wet shirt.

"Wade said that a suzu was a Japanese bell?"

"Mind bloody suzu." Dale reminded him. "Could be something low hanging perhaps? Gam Saan's instructions were different – 'high tunnel, first tunnel, red ore rock'."

"We took the first tunnel off the main chamber." Riley said without turning. "And we saw the red ore rock."

"'Water by footsteps'. That sump must have always been flooded."

"Then 'Gold stream'." Riley said aloud. "That was next on his list?"

More water would not be welcome. The pain of icy wet clothes was starting to fade into not very much sensation at all, anywhere.

"Gold and suzu must be connected in some way," Dale thought aloud, making his mind focus away from his body onto the matter at hand. "Maybe it's another rock formation?"

The main tunnel was petering out. It ended in a flat wall, a dead end, and Riley turned back, muttering.

"Ok. The way out is going to have to be one of these side chambers. What do you call them? Stopes? We'll just have to try them in turn."

"Pot hook. Red. Ginver's hole." Dale said aloud. "What was the first exit off after Ginver's hole?"

"There's only been one or two since that point." Riley said, running the torch over the walls. "There's a lot more rubble lying around up here, it looks like there was less mining – or they started and then gave up."

"I wonder if this was mostly flooded tunnels?" Dale paused, looking around them. "If once the sump flooded this part of the mine was abandoned?"

"Gam Saan must have liked swimming." Riley said sourly. "There's this exit here – that's the first after Ginver's hole. But if there's an exit up here, why did he and David write the directions from the main tunnel? We've followed the directions up here, they clearly came this way from the main entrance."

It was a good point. And it made it more likely they were going to have to swim back across Ginver's hole and risk traversing the collapsed tunnels.

Riley flashed the torch into the exit again, then stepped through, muttering, "Well so long as we're here….."

The tunnel was roughly cut and low, and it didn't lead very far. Within a few minutes Dale felt something under his boot and stooped, picking up an old fuse.

"There was blasting done down here," Riley said ahead of him. "Look at this."

The blasted out section was obviously newer than the rest of the cleared out tunnel. The exposed surfaces were a different colour to the rest of the walls, and the heap of rubble on the ground hadn't been cleared. A pick had apparently been used to hollow out rock near to the ground, and it still lay there, abandoned in the shale. The torch beam shone on white rock, sparkling.

"Quartz." Riley said. "Lots of it. Quartz and – Dale, look!"

Riley crouched and Dale stooped over his shoulder to see. It was clear, clustered on the quartz like a fungus in the nooks and the crannies of the rock and sunk deep into the white crystal.

Gold.

Riley handed the torch back to Dale, then stooped and took up the abandoned pick axe with experienced hands. He had done hard physical work every day of his life for the last fifteen years; Dale watched his shoulders flex and the pick axe bite deep and hard into the rock, then pull away, breaking rock away with it. The pieces fell at their feet in chunks and rubble, the gold mixed into the quartz. The veins ran thick through the rock, each new exposed piece showing more glitters.

It was clear why Gam Saan had been unable to resist this tunnel.

It was a minute or two before Dale touched Riley's shoulder, hating to stop him.  

"We ought to get moving. The torch battery won't last forever."

Riley hacked a few times more at the last one or two large pieces he could see, and finally Dale took his arm and pulled, stooping to help him gather together the small heap of gold loaded quartz rubble.

"Riley, come on now."

"It's not like we'll ever get down here again?" Riley reminded him. "Flynn wouldn't care if the crown jewels were down here, he'll go nuts when he realises where we are."

And Flynn would realise. The thought of Flynn somewhere above them, cut through some of the clinical numbness of mind and body with a tendril of both warmth and of alarm. They were now approaching a mile away from the point of the landslide, deep in the tunnels, in a place very difficult to locate, they were cold and wet, and Dale had a nasty feeling it was largely his fault. Their odds were not getting much better.  

It was then that the torch beam flickered, and went out.

***

On To Chapter 12

Copyright Rolf and Ranger 2009